‘[T]o listen to music too hard – to hear it in terms of its component sounds, and to co-ordinate these with some production-orientated scheme of representation – is to risk not hearing music at all’ (Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture [Oxford, 1990], p.161). Truly to listen as Wordsworth desires must as a minimum require suspension of musical-analytic memory and inference, because precisely such functions will interrupt the completeness of listening.

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